Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Idaho ... these are the latest fronts in the battle of budgets, with the larger fight over a potential shutdown of the US government looming. These fights, radiating out from the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol building, are occurring against the backdrop of the two wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. No discussion or debate over budgets, over wages and pensions, over deficits, should happen without a clear presentation of the costs of these wars – and the incalculable benefits that ending them would bring.

First, the cost of war. The US is spending about $2bn a week in Afghanistan alone. That’s about $104bn a year – and that is not including Iraq. Compare that with the state budget shortfalls. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, "some 45 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls totalling $125bn for fiscal year 2012."

The math is simple: the money should be poured back into the states, rather than into a state of war.

President Barack Obama shows no signs that he is going to end either the occupation of Iraq or the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Quite the opposite: he campaigned with the promise to expand the war in Afghanistan, and that is one campaign promise he has kept. So how is Obama’s war going? Not well.

This has been the deadliest period for civilians in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion began in October 2001. Sixty-five civilians were reportedly killed recently in Kunar, near Pakistan, where mounting civilian casualties lead to increasing popular support for the Taliban. 2010 was the deadliest year for US soldiers as well, with 711 US and allied deaths in Afghanistan. Soldier deaths remain high in 2011, with the fighting expected to intensify as the weather warms.

The Washington Post recently reported that Obama’s controversial CIA-run drone programme, in which unmanned aerial drones are sent over rural Pakistan to launch Hellfire missiles at "suspected militants", has killed at least 581 people, of whom only two were on a US list of people suspected of being "high-level militants". Ample evidence exists that the drone strikes, which have increased in number dramatically under Obama’s leadership, kill civilians, not to mention Pakistani civilian support for the United States.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the democracy that the neocons in Washington expected to deliver through the barrel of a gun with their "shock and awe" may be coming finally – not with the help of the US, but, rather, inspired by the peaceful, popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. However, Human Rights Watch has just reported that as people protest and dissidents organise, "the rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are routinely violated with impunity."

Protests have erupted in another Tahrir Square, in Baghdad (yes, it means "liberation" in Iraq and Egypt), against corruption, and demanding jobs and better public services. Iraqi government forces killed 29 people over the weekend; and 300 people, including human-rights workers and journalists, have been rounded up.

Yet, the US continues to pour money and troops into these endless wars. Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings, whose reporting exposed the crass behaviour of General Stanley McChrystal, has just exposed what he calls an illegal operation run by Lt Gen William Caldwell in Afghanistan, in which a US Army "psy-ops" operation was mounted against US senators and other visiting dignitaries in order to win support and more funding. One of Hastings’ military sources quoted Caldwell as saying: "How do we get these guys to give us more people? … What do I have to plant inside their heads?"

The recently retired special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar), Arnold Fields, just reported that $11.4bn is at risk due to inadequate planning. Another group, the US Commission on Wartime Contracting, "concludes that the United States has wasted tens of billions of the nearly $200bn that has been spent on contracts and grants since 2002 to support military, reconstruction and other US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Which brings us back to those teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters in Wisconsin. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, told me in the Capitol rotunda in Madison why the unionised firefighters were there, even though their union was one not targeted by Governor Scott Walker’s bill: "This is about an attack on the middle class."

By shutting down the attacks on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, we can prevent these attacks on the poor and middle class here at home.

Denis Moynihan contributed to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” an independent, daily global TV/radio news hour airing on more than 950 stations in the United States and around the world. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

JONNYSAUNDERS: I know we have a tough time parting with our money to pay for teachers, and I know the dirty word here in this state is "taxes." I know we can’t afford to pay for our children’s future. I understand that. We’re all a too little caught up in buying another car to raise our taxes. I understand that. No, no, I get it.

RALLYAUDIENCEMEMBER: Yeah. Let’s not send our taxes out of state.

JONNYSAUNDERS: Yeah, let’s send them somewhere else. But the thing is that we need to pay for a society that we live in. Teaching is not just another job in this society; it’s the way our future is shaped, and it’s the way the next generation is raised.

AMYGOODMAN: That was 17-year-old high school student Jonny Saunders from Boise, Idaho, joining us now by Democracy Now! video stream. Why did you lead this walkout, Jonny?

JONNYSAUNDERS: Just a clarification: I didn’t necessarily lead the walkout. The project was a different student; it was Tyler Honsinger of Boise High, who started it. I just extended the branch over to my high school, at Timberline High. But the answer to why we started or why we necessarily had a walkout is to show that students, too, indeed oppose this bill and that there’s no real student that I’ve met that supports it, except for the students of businessmen or the students of parents that necessarily support it because it benefits their industry. The general attitude of students today is that we’re kind of caught in the crosshairs, so to speak, that we are being blamed by politicking senators that we are the ones that are being abused by our teachers or something like that. And we just wanted to show that it was our free will, and we chose to oppose the bill — it wasn’t the evil teachers that were brainwashing us — that we had read the bill, and we oppose what it said.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the education system? You talked about — you spoke against merit pay, which is a very — there’s a very big movement for this all over the country — saying the plan would ultimately lead to teachers only teaching to test. Why?

JONNYSAUNDERS: Well, the system of merit pay, it’s not a flawed system. I understand that people respond to incentives. But the incentive in merit pay is the incorrect one. When you have standardized testing, especially math tests, in particular, and tests like that that are the only metric of how student progress is measured, the teacher can give up on their creative curriculum. Teaching is — should be — at least, it comes down to the philosophy of what you think education should be, whether it should be kids memorizing facts or whether it should be a teacher that teaches their kids to function in the real world. And what merit pay does is it incentivizes teachers to, quote, "drill and kill" the test answers, or sometimes they will — it literally gives them an incentive just to increase test scores, and so they can — I’m not claiming any teacher of being dishonest, but it does incentivize cheating. It incentivizes not going off curriculum, because the second you step off curriculum, that’s another thousand dollars you lose off your paycheck. If you’re not drilling and making kids memorize exactly what’s on the curriculum, then you’ll end up losing money. And that’s a very powerful motivator, as the people who passed the bill know. It’s just that the political reality of what merit pay does is very different than the lofty rhetoric of rewarding teachers for being good teachers. Yeah, and it just turns into a negative system that turns into rote memorization every time.

AMYGOODMAN: Jonny Saunders, I want to thank you for being with us — we have come to the end of our show — student activist at Timberline High School in Boise, Idaho. As we continue to cover the protests around this country, from the Midwest to the Middle East to North Africa, stay with us in these days. You can go to our website for updates at democracynow.org.